Part Three: Former RCMP investigator a beacon for change (with video)

Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun03.23.2012

Svay Pak, Cambodia: Former RCMP forensics expert and Ratanak International’s founder – Brian McConaghy – stands outside a former brothel. It was the first crime scene he went to in the village and it’s where he helped Vancouver police collect evidence needed to convict Canada’s first sex tourist, Donald Bakker.Courtesy
/ Ratanak International

Rahab's House in Svay Pak.Courtesy Brian McConaghy
/ Ratanak International

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A few years ago, sex tourists trolled the brothels of this dusty village looking for sex with children and willing to pay a premium for virgins and children as young as three.

Little girls with lipstick no longer strike sexy poses along the main street. But pimps still come and collect their girls and boys from a kids’ club run by a non-profit group in a former brothel on that same street.

Agape International Mission runs that program. It also runs a school, retraining for girls rescued from the sex trade, a medical clinic, and a gym for boys and young men (some of whom are pimps and brothel owners).

Vancouver-based Ratanak International provided the seed money and continues to fund a third of all the programs.

In November, Ratanak’s founder, Brian McConaghy, came to take a look at the most recent rental, a former brothel that will be converted into a clothing factory.

“No, it can’t be,” he said as he stepped through the door. “This is my Bakker crime scene ... It’s astonishing. This is my very first crime scene [in Cambodia]. I’ve seen too many [child pornography] videos of what was going on here ... This is poetry that it will be transformed in this way.”

McConaghy first entered the building in 2004 as an RCMP forensics expert along with a team from the Vancouver Police Department. It’s here that they found evidence proving that Donald Bakker of Vancouver had raped seven girls, the youngest of whom was seven.

The building is already different. Dozens of doors once ran off the central core.

The cubicles are gone and all that remains in the empty space is an old video game: Lethal Enforcer. “The kids used to play on it in the front, waiting to get abused,” he says.

McConaghy’s first visit to this building dramatically changed his life and that of several hundred children.

In July 2005, Bakker pleaded guilty and became Canada’s first convicted sex tourist.

Four years later and soon after testifying as an expert at the trial of serial killer Willie Pickton, McConaghy quit the RCMP. He was two years short of qualifying for a full pension.

*

Brian McConaghy grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a protestant, in the midst of ‘The Troubles.’

His family immigrated to Ottawa when he was a teen. Dyslexic, McConaghy was a poor student. But he managed to get into Algonquin College’s museum studies program. Fascinated by weapons, he landed an internship at the Canadian War Museum where his detailed knowledge came to the attention of RCMP recruiters. Get a university degree, any degree, they said, and we’ll hire you.

After graduating with a history degree, McConaghy was hired and sent to Vancouver.

“I went from having a stable, happy home life to feeling like an abandoned kid living on a diet of autopsies, crime scenes and staff sergeants yelling in my face.”

Through a friend from Ottawa, McConaghy met a group of Christian, international students studying at the University of British Columbia. “Most of them were Asian, but I bonded with them because I felt like a refugee, too.”

On his first vacation, the 24-year-old flew to Hong Kong in October 1989. He had the names of friends of friends and a vague plan to “see Asia.” About a week later, he arrived at a Bangkok guest house late at night.

There were young girls from northern Thai hill tribes there, smoking dope.

“Mr. Christian RCMP told the girls not to do that because they’d end up in prostitution,” McConaghy says with a laugh. “Shades of things to come.”

In Bangkok, one of the friends of McConaghy’s friends was a young woman working for the Christian Missionary Alliance, which ran a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border. McConaghy talked his way into visiting the camp. There, a medic named Obie met McConaghy, made it clear that sightseers weren’t welcome and dropped him off at a hostel.

With nothing to do, McConaghy put on his Walkman, turned up the volume and went to the local market. He was oblivious to the thud, thud, thud of shelling nearby and to all the people gathering around radios listening to reports of the Vietnamese coming across the border.

Suddenly, Obie appeared, shoved McConaghy into a truck with a plan to deliver him to an evacuation centre. But McConaghy balked.

“I told him I grew up in Belfast and was totally comfortable with shelling.”

Obie didn’t argue. They went to the medical centre where over the next few days, McConaghy loaded injured people on to stretchers. He keenly recalls one woman who staggered down the mountainside.

“She was featherweight. She had come through the minefields. I couldn’t begin to guess her age because she was so emaciated and she absolutely stank. She was filthy with excrement from diarrhea caked on her. She was a pathetic piece of humanity and suddenly my whole world opened up.”

Where had she come from? he asked. The killing fields of Kampuchea, he was told. Kampuchea was the Khmer Rouge’s name for Cambodia.

You’ll never get in there, he was told.

“To an Irish guy, that’s raising a red flag. I had to go.”

Back home, McConaghy rented the movie The Killing Fields, and soaked up everything he could about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.

The following year, he was back in Bangkok. It took a month to negotiate a Cambodian visa. Because Cambodia and Vietnam were still at war, Canadian embassy staff warned that if anything went wrong, no one would come to get him.

*

On May 1 — May Day and a holiday in Communist countries — McConaghy boarded a Russian-built plane with bare tires in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. The only other passengers were Cambodian-Americans. One was going to find his mother; the other wanted to see the country’s killing fields that he’d escaped as a child. One was excited; the other was terrified that even if he found his mother, he’d be arrested and never get out again.

“We flew through Vietnam while the pilot and co-pilot negotiated landing in Phnom Penh ... I was still young enough and naive enough to be exhilarated. I realized what a rare privilege it was to go to forbidden places.”

Only a few hundred thousand were living in Phnom Penh at the time. Most of the city’s two million people had been marched out after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. In the four years that followed, an estimated two million people died of starvation or were murdered in the killing fields.

Terrified and traumatized, no one used their real name. There was no electricity. Women baked baguettes over open fires to sell in the city’s alleys.

“It was so silent. In the buildings abandoned by people led off to be executed, people from the country had moved in and used them like caves ... What I was looking at were people living as if they were in the Stone Age, with Mercedes and TVs in heaps, the residue of a functional society laid waste by its own people.”

McConaghy got around on cyclos, bicycles fitted with a two passenger seats in front.

“It was so quiet you could hear the squeak of the saddle. There was a certain charm to it ... There was a dignity to that poverty. Despite everything, they were trying to do the best they could with nothing.”

To his Communist minders’ horror, McConaghy insisted on going to the famous temples at Angkor.

“I was walking with soldiers carrying AK-47s. The fighting was so close you could hear the soldiers yelling at each other. We could see the odd Buddhist monks and a few kids in novice robes.”

Retreating hastily to Siem Reap, he went back to Grand Hotel.

“One of the most profound experiences I had was in the dining lounge, which was derelict with six or eight folding tables with yellowed cloths with holes in them. A little, old man came out in a high-necked white tunic from colonial times with a tray held up over his shoulder. His jacket was stained and worn-out. It was heartbreaking. He served us as if we were in Paris, presenting the very best that he had, even though it was only pork and rice.”

Weird as it all was, McConaghy had fallen in love with Cambodia and its people.

*

Despite the United Nations embargo against Cambodia, over the next year McConaghy amassed nine tonnes and $10,000-worth of equipment and drugs with donations from pharmaceutical companies and friends. He bought a shipping container. Most importantly, he figured out that he had to switch containers in Singapore so that it couldn’t be traced to Canada.

Ever the forensic scientist, McConaghy videotaped the container before it left so he could identify its unique rust spots when it arrived in Phnom Penh. He didn’t want it to be scooped by Communist government officials.

Once the container arrived in Phnom Penh, McConaghy spent two days negotiating its release with government officials who threatened to arrest him. All the while, he was suffering from both dysentery and strep throat.

In the end, the government agreed to let him distribute the medical supplies.

McConaghy had breached the UN embargo. He was hailed as a hero on state-run television. The government held a reception in his honour. More importantly, the health minister gave McConaghy a fax number to call whenever he needed a visa.

“That was gold. Because when you go from taking two suitcases into a country to taking nine tonnes, you have to do it again. And that’s the beginnings of Ratanak.”

But, it was his first and last container. It was just too difficult.

*

Not that it stopped him. In 1992, after McConaghy found out that a hospital in Kampong Cham province had no water, he arranged to have a pump flown in from Scandinavia. A water tower needed to be built, but there were none to be bought in Cambodia. McConaghy and local volunteers scavenged abandoned work sites and took what they needed.

A crane was assembled on the back of a truck that was so old, it wouldn’t move. McConaghy hired 20 guys to push it to the site.

More Canadians started handing him cheques for what he called the Ratanak Project, named after a little girl who died of an curable illness due to a lack of medicine. For three years, an American charitable organization called Samaritan’s Purse acted as Ratanak’s banker and issued tax receipts to donors. But as Ratanak grew, Samaritan’s founder Franklin Graham refused to continue issuing receipts for projects he didn’t control.

So, Graham offered McConaghy a full-time job overseeing bigger budgets and more projects in more countries.

McConaghy declined. His heart was fixed on Cambodia.

For the next 14 years, McConaghy had two full-time jobs — one with Ratanak, the other with the RCMP. Only the RCMP job paid a salary.

He went to Cambodia at least once every year. His ties deepened after he and his wife, Louise, adopted two Cambodian boys.

His love for the country and its people never wavered, not even in 1997 after he’d helped Michael Senor go home.

Adopted as a child by Canadians, the young man was conflicted about his identity. McConaghy encouraged him to go to Cambodia.

But when Michael arrived, there were tanks and firefights on Phnom Penh’s streets. Michael went out on the streets to capture it on film. He didn’t understand Khmer and didn’t stop when soldiers yelled at him. One put an AK-47 to his head and killed him.

His Canadian fiance witnessed it and only escaped the country with the help of the Canadian and Australian embassies.

Later, Michael’s grieving parents donated money to Ratanak, which is used to fund a home for children whose parents are in prison.

*

“I was happy to continue working with the RCMP because I had my different worlds,” McConaghy says.

But in 2004, his worlds collided.

McConaghy was working on the Pickton investigation, studying the cut marks on bones and fragments of some of the 49 women that Pickton is believed to have murdered when Vancouver police answered a distressed call from a woman. She was being tortured by Donald Bakker in an isolated park along Vancouver’s waterfront. They searched Bakker’s car and found pornographic videos stashed in the trunk.

The girls in the videos were Asian. But where were they from?

Detective Ron Bieg had heard of McConaghy and his connection to Cambodia. He called him and McConaghy reluctantly agreed to view the tapes.

“It wasn’t a matter that I was investigating. And if you’ve never seen videos of children being abused, you don’t realize that it is a pivotal experience. You have a choice after you’ve seen them: You either walk away from it or you extract everything you can from it and allow it to change you. I did the latter.”

The girls were speaking Khmer — the language of Cambodia — and Vietnamese. McConaghy also noticed a 2003 calendar on the wall. McConaghy didn’t usually watch NBC’s Dateline. That night he did. McConaghy believes it was divine intervention.

It featured a segment called “Children for Sale” about a raid by the International Justice Mission (IJM) on a brothel in Svay Pak. He immediately called Bieg and told him to turn on his TV.

The next day, they ran Bakker’s tapes next to the Dateline clips. There were some of the same girls and the same calendar. They got in touch with IJM and determined that four of the seven girls Bakker assaulted had been rescued in the raid and were in a Phnom Penh safe house.

McConaghy, Bieg and two other investigators arrived in Svay Pak shortly after that. Their first stop was the brothel where the girls were rescued and the one that will soon be the Ratanak-funded textile factory.

“Up until then, I always knew the sex-trade thing was there. But I didn’t want to go near it because the police were massively corrupt and you could get knifed very easily,” McConaghy says. “The vast majority of work that NGOs do is not adversarial. But the minute they intersect with the criminal community to try to intercept their products [the children], it’s like separating cocaine from drug dealers.

“Bakker opened that world to me. It was clear there were some senior police officers who were trustworthy even during that first trip for the Bakker investigation. There were also parents who are disgusted by what was happening. So, I realized that doing something about it was do-able with the right contacts.”

*

Meanwhile, Californians Don and Bridget Brewster heard about Ratanak. Don was a minister at an evangelical church; Bridget was a wife and mother who’d raised four children. They’d spent time in Cambodia and even though they had no experience and no specific training, they were determined to set up a trauma recovery centre for girls and young women rescued from the sex trade.

McConaghy flew to California to meet them, listened carefully to their plan for the nascent Agape International Missions and then handed them a $50,000 cheque. They were so shocked that Bridget says they neglected to say thank you.

For the next three years, Ratanak paid all of AIM’s bills and it still provides about a third of AIM’s program costs.

AIM rented two villas in an upscale Phnom Penh neighbourhood and spent a year training staff. In 2006, the first girls moved in to the NewSong Centre in 2006.

It was only three years ago that McConaghy found out that among Ratanak’s beneficiaries are some of Bakker’s victims. Several went to NewSong; another was at a Ratanak-funded trauma centre run by Hagar International, an Australian-based NGO.

At about the same time, McConaghy had made his decision to resign from the RCMP and devote all his time and energy to expanding Ratanak’s work in Cambodia.

It now has full-time staff in Cambodia and, for the first time, will operate its own programs which are likely to focus on prevention. Under consideration are a program for sexually exploited boys as well as one for women who have been turned out of brothels after they’re too old and too damaged to continue. With no skills and little education, most of those women end up begging on the streets. But many also turn into pimps and human traffickers.

As much as McConaghy admires the rescue work done by groups like IJM, it’s not for him.

Since his first visit, he has felt called to help Cambodians lift themselves out of half a century of violence and poverty. It’s the complicated, slow-moving stuff of development from digging wells to building schools and strengthening the justice system.

And it’s the only way to build a society where selling children into sex slavery is inconceivable.

“All of that is much less emotionally satisfying than kicking in doors and rounding up these guys,” McConaghy says wryly.

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